Scholarly Expertise / Activity

Interests:

Women’s mental health

Immigrant women

Culture and mental health

Gender specific mental health risks

Transcultural psychiatry

Dr. Saint Arnault’s research centers on gender, cultural and social influences on mental health, trauma recovery, and help seeking. She develops and tests her Cultural Determinants of Help Seeking theory in research with women in the U.S., Ireland, Japan, Brazil, Italy and Portugal. In this research, she uses mixed methods to discover how distress experiences, culturally based meanings (such as stigma and sense of coherence), social support, and social negativity impact the help seeking journey. Her Clinical Ethnographic Narrative Interview (CENI) provides a transcultural method that allows people to explore the cultural and social influences in their search for health, and also promotes self-awareness and active engagement in the help-seeking process. She also examines cultural factors that influence meaning, expectation, and expression of depression. She examines the importance of physical as well as emotional symptom experience for people from a variety of cultures. In addition, Dr. Saint Arnault focuses on the impact of gender-based trauma on mental health, functioning and quality of life. She is currently researching mind-body and culturally tailored interventions to promote mental and physical health for women from a variety of cultures.

Current Research Grants and Programs:

The feasibility of the use of Biodynamic Therapy to enhance quality of life in women who have experienced trauma, PI, Safe Ireland (National Domestic Violence Agency)

Teaching

Dr. Saint Arnault’s teaching focuses on Psychiatric and Mental Health nursing care. She specializes in mood disorders and women’s mental health. She has published chapters in Psychiatric nursing textbooks of cross cultural psychiatric nursing. She has developed and taught courses ranging from the fundamentals of psychiatric nursing to international and global health, cultural competency in nursing, qualitative and mixed research methods, philosophy of the natural and social sciences, community based ethnography, clinical ethnography, concepts of the self across cultures, transcultural psychiatry and comparative health care (US and Japan). She is passionate about developing and teaching broad-based evidence to inform culturally relevant psychiatric nursing care for diverse populations, and the use of creative methods to enhance our knowledge development.

Shaku, F. and Saint Arnault, D.M. (2014). Measuring the effects of Zen training on quality of life and mental health among Japanese monk trainees: a cross-sectional study. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.

Saint Arnault, D.M. and Roels, D. (2011). The maintenance of conformity: Social networks among Japanese women living in America. International Journal of Culture and Mental Health. DOI: 10.1080/17542863.2011.554030

Saint Arnault, D. M., Sakamoto, S., & Moriwaki, A. (2005). A cross-cultural study of the experiential structure of emotions of distress: Preliminary findings in a sample of female Japanese and American college students. Psychologia: International Journal of the psychology of the Orient.